“But in the Days Before Modern Science, they Didnt Understand Homosexuality”

Ive repeatedly read people claim (EG) that in the days before modern science, human-kind didnt understand homosexuality. Matthew Vines, for example, stated in his misleading yet popular 1 hour video that “the concept of sexual orientation is very recent; it was only developed within the past century”. A court submission (p.3) in Canada during their process of changing marital gender laws, claimed that “the idea of ‘homosexuality’ was not possible until after 1870”. This claim is made alongside a statement that “the word ‘homosexual’ did not exist until after 1870.” From these assertions, you can easily start to assume that people from centuries past were completely isolated from the concepts of same-sex sexuality, and that they perhaps had no vocabulary for it either.

But apparently the word ‘brunch‘ did not exist until the 1890s. Does that mean that before that point, people had no concept of a late…